Many recent networking trends, such as Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), Voice Over Internet. Protocol (VOIP), provide complex services to users, thereby increasing the bandwidth demands on a network, and subsequently causing increasing use of 10 Gb Ethernet links in servers and data centers.
In many networks, data packets are monitored, such as for compliances troubleshooting, performance tuning and enforcing network security. Current packet monitoring tools are server based, and are generally not able to keep up with the increasing packet rates.
Current packet monitoring tools are described, for example, in the RFC 3577 standard entitled “Introduction to the Remote Monitoring (RMON) Family of Management Information Base Modules”, in the RFC 4502 standard, entitled. “Remote Network Monitoring Management Information Base version 2”, and in the RFC 2613 standard entitled “Remote Network Monitoring Management Information Base Extensions for Switched Networks”, which are incorporated herein by reference.
Due to the increasingly large packet rates, current packet monitoring tools usually employ some reduced monitoring policy, such as monitoring a sample of the packets or filtering the packets in a static fashion. One example of a monitoring policy, which is based on sampling of packets, is described in Applicant's U.S. Pat. No. 6,920,112, filed on Jun. 29, 1998 and entitled “SAMPLING PACKETS FOR NETWORK MONITORING”, which is hereby incorporated by reference.
Additionally, current packet capturing tools may not enable direction of packet traffic to different monitoring devices or packet sniffers, and specifically not in an application-aware manner, particularly in networks having dynamic topologies.
U.S. Patent Application Publication Number 2003/0225549, filed on Mar. 31, 2003 and entitled “SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR END-TO-END QUALITY OF SERVICE MEASUREMENTS IN A DISTRIBUTED NETWORK ENVIRONMENT”, which is hereby incorporated by reference, describes monitoring stations which are configured to provide information on all seven layers in the OSI network model, for the purpose of measuring and increasing quality-of-service in a network.
Applicant's U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2007/0189288, filed on Feb. 13, 2006 and entitled “METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR PROVIDING CONFIGURATION OF NETWORK ELEMENTS THROUGH HIERARCHICAL INHERITANCE”, which is hereby incorporated by reference, describes a system and a method for monitoring packets based on a logical group of devices from which they were sent.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,681,232, filed on May 22, 2001 and entitled “OPERATIONS AND PROVISIONING SYSTEMS FOR SERVICE LEVEL MANAGEMENT IN AN EXTENDED-AREA DATA COMMUNICATIONS NETWORK”, which is hereby incorporated by, reference, describes an application aware data analyzer which acts as an intelligent sniffer for all traffic passing through a specific link in a network.
The present invention will be more fully understood from the following detailed description of embodiments thereof, taken together with the drawings in which: